William Kristol:

In 1973, Kristol received a B.A. from Harvard, graduating magna cum laude in three years. In 1976, he worked as deputy issues director for Patrick Moynihan's New York Democratic primary campaign for a U.S. Senate seat. Kristol received a Ph.D. in government, also from Harvard, in 1979. During his first year of graduate school, Kristol shared a room with a fellow government doctoral candidate Alan Keyes, whose unsuccessful 1988 Maryland Senatorial campaign against Paul Sarbanes Kristol would later run in.

Career

He served as chairman of the Project for the Republican Future from 1993 to 1994, and as the director of the Bradley Project at the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee in 1993. Kristol first made his mark as leader of the Project for the Republican Future, a conservative think tank, and rose to fame as a conservative opinion maker during the battle over the Clinton health care plan.

In the first of what would become legendary strategy memos circulated among Republican policymakers, Kristol said the party should "kill", not amend or compromise on, the Clinton health care plan. The success of the Clinton proposal, he warned, would "re-legitimize middle-class dependence for 'security' on government spending and regulation", and "revive ... the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests." Kristol's memo immediately became important in uniting Republicans behind total opposition to Clinton's reform plan. A later memo advocated the phrase "There is no health care crisis," which Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole used in his response to Clinton's 1994 State of the Union address.

In 1994, after Republicans gained a majority in the House and began to institute the Contract with America, Kristol said, "The fact that government is no longer going to be so generous with taxpayers' money may be Scrooge-like, but it strikes me as rather responsible behavior. For too many years, some liberals have felt they were doing good by generously spending taxpayers' money. Now Americans, want to take a much harder look at what really does good and what does harm."^[1]

Media commentator

He is currently a visiting professor at Harvard University, where he is teaching a course in the school's Government Department with Professor Harvey Mansfield entitled "The Mirror of Princes" on Xenophon, a Greek philosopher and soldier known for his writings on the history of his own times, the sayings of Socrates, and the life of Greece. Kristol also taught a course entitled "Can America Be Governed?" at the Kennedy School of Government. In addition to his role as a political contributor on Fox News, Kristol was for a time a semi-regular guest on the now cancelled World News Tonight on Sky News. He is also a patron of the British think tank the Henry Jackson Society, based at the University of Cambridge.

On December 29, 2007, the New York Times announced that Kristol would write a weekly column for its op-ed page, beginning on January 7, 2008.^[3] He had previously worked as a columnist for Time during 2007.^[4]

According to a report published in The Daily Beast on October 10, 2008, Kristol is among the few conservative commentators who support John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election. "Kristol was the among most prominent in pushing Palin—arguing that she was young, popular, vigorous, unknown and had the right connections to the Religious Right bloc which had proven so important to Republican wins in 2000 and 2004." His American opinion magazine, The Weekly Standard, which serves as "Palin’s chief defender" against attacks, hosted a cruise in June 2007, where Standard editors Kristol and Fred Barnes first lunched with Governor Sarah Palin. ^[5]

On the October 19, 2008 edition of Fox News Sunday, on which Kristol is a political commentator, Kristol predicted that if the Tampa Bay Rays were to defeat the Boston Red Sox in game 7 of the American League Championship Series (ALCS), which was to take place on the evening of October 19, that Barack Obama would defeat John McCain for the Presidency of the United States on November 4. ^[6]

Political views

Kristol was "perhaps the most outspoken supporter of the Iraq War".^[7] On September 18, 2002, he declared that a war in Iraq "could have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East." A day later, he said Saddam Hussein was "past the finish line" in developing nuclear weapons. On February 20, 2003, he said of Saddam: "He's got weapons of mass destruction ... Look, if we free the people of Iraq we will be respected in the Arab world." On March 1, 2003 — 18 days before the invasion of Iraq — Kristol dismissed the possibility of sectarian conflict afterward. He also said, "Very few wars in American history were prepared better or more thoroughly than this one by this president." He maintained that the war would cost $100 billion to $200 billion, but this was inaccurate, as the cost is now about half a trillion dollars. On March 5, 2003, Kristol said, "We'll be vindicated when we discover the weapons of mass destruction."

In 2003, just as the Iraq War was starting, Kristol appeared on the National Public Radio show Fresh Air and made the following statement: "There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America ... that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq's always been very secular."^[8] Kristol also wrote a book "The War Over Iraq" with Lawrence Kaplan before the Iraq War and stated that: "The United States may need to occupy Iraq for some time. Though U.N., European and Arab forces will, as in Afghanistan, contribute troops, the principal responsibility will doubtless fall to the country that liberates Baghdad. According to one estimate, initially as many as 75,000 troops may be required to police the war's aftermath, at a cost of $16 billion a year. As other countries' forces arrive, and as Iraq rebuilds its economy and political system, that force could probably be drawn down to several thousand soldiers after a year or two." ^[9] These analyses have proven hugely inaccurate: The war in Iraq costs approximately $12 billion a month, and American forces there number about 150,000.

Kristol has on occasion criticized George W. Bush for not being conservative enough. In 2004, he wrote an op-ed strongly criticizing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.^[10] He was also the first of many conservatives to publicly oppose Bush's second U.S. Supreme Court nominee, Harriet Miers. He said of Miers: "I'm disappointed, depressed, and demoralized. [...] It is very hard to avoid the conclusion that President Bush flinched from a fight on constitutional philosophy. Miers is undoubtedly a decent and competent person. But her selection will unavoidably be judged as reflecting a combination of cronyism and capitulation on the part of the president."

He has also been a vocal supporter of the 2006 Israeli attack on Lebanon, stating that the war is "our war too," referring to the United States. He continues to back the Iraq war, and favors imposing sanctions on Iran, and suggested in June of 2006 that, "we might consider countering this act of Iranian aggression with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait?"^[11]

Criticism